OK, I'm utterly biased. Photographer Dennis Nett and I have worked together for a quarter-century. He is a guy with deep Syracuse roots, and I've seen him take magnificent photographs in hundreds of wildly different situations. Most important, I've seen his relentless respect and affection for his subjects, whether they're farmers in the hills near Lockerbie or families wounded by street violence in Syracuse.

But I woke up this morning, looked at the paper and thought: The image Dennis captured of the CJ Fair-Rodney Hood collision last night has to go on the short list of great sports photographs in the history of The Post-Standard.

It's not just that Dennis nailed the moment at the core of a nationwide debate, as Duke edged Syracuse University in men's basketball. It's not just the way the contact itself is underlined, magnified, by one flash of orange, amid all that T-shirt-wearing, face-painted, diehard blue. It's not just the gasp (or roar) of do-or-die from Fair, or the expression from Tyler Thornton - in that second, reduced to an eyewitness - that says everything about the meaning of whatever comes next. It's not even only in how the fans in the stands so wonderfully embody what all of us watching the game were feeling, in one fashion or another: That guy in the glasses in the second section ... is he praying? How about the perfect 'O' in the expression of the guy in the porkpie hat, in the lower seats?

What's amazing, really, is that Dennis captures an instant of absolute communion between two legendary programs: The call is unmade, and what joins the millions watching at that second is the sense of drama, and consummate passion, and their hope that the action, however it ends, will go their way.